“Thanks, Bill,” he concluded. “Let me know when you’ve got something.”

Sam ended the call and reached for the wine bottle. When he realized that Abby was watching him, he raised his brows. “What?”

“Must be nice to be able to pick up a phone and have a lawyer snap to attention like that for you,” she said.

“There are benefits to having access to the resources of a privately held company.” Sam poured wine into one of the glasses. “But guys like Bill don’t come cheap, and they don’t exactly snap to attention, sadly.”

He splashed some whiskey into the second glass and carried both across the room to where Abby sat.

“Thank you for trying to protect Thaddeus’s collection,” she said. She swallowed some of the wine and lowered the glass. “It meant everything to him.”

“We might be able to protect his books, at least for now, but if there is an heir and if he or she doesn’t appreciate the value of the collection, the books will probably go straight into the used-book market,” Sam said.

“Or a yard sale.”

Sam drank some whiskey and sank down onto the couch next to Newton. Absently, he scratched Newton’s ears.

Abby smiled proudly. “Newton was a real hero today, wasn’t he?”

“You’re not supposed to anthropomorphize,” Sam said. “Dogs don’t think in terms of bravery and cowardice. He recognized a threat, and he followed his instincts.”

“He was trying to protect me.”

“You’re his pack buddy. Like I said, he was just going on instinct.”

Abby took another sip of wine. “You were protecting me, too. You’re human. Am I allowed to call you brave and daring and heroic?”

“Nope.” He drank some more whiskey. “I was just doing my job.”

“Heroes always say stuff like that, you know.”

“In this case, it’s the simple truth. You hired me to find a blackmailer. Now it looks like I’m dealing with a blackmailer who is getting desperate enough to commit murder and attempted kidnapping.”

“And you hired me to find that lab book. Which reminds me.” She reached into her tote, took out her phone and checked her email. “There are a few new messages. Let me see if any of them are from those dealers I contacted earlier.”

She ran through the new mail. There was a note from her father, reminding her of the signing event, and a message from her stepmother, demanding that she get in touch immediately. Ignoring the first two emails, she opened the third. In spite of her exhaustion, she experienced another flash of adrenaline.

“Here we go,” she said, trying to keep her professional cool. “The auction is scheduled for next week. No preemptive bids are allowed, but it has been noted that my client will try to top any bid. We are guaranteed the opportunity to do so.”

Sam sat forward, eyes heating. Energy whispered in the atmosphere. Newton stirred and raised his head, ears sharpened.

Sam looked at the phone. “Which dealer is running the auction?”

“He calls himself Milton,” Abby said. “But that’s just his online alias. I don’t know anything more about him, aside from the fact that he is one of the dealers who works with the most dangerous collectors and the most dangerous books. I’ve never done business with him, but he says he knows my reputation and trusts that my client is solid.”

“I’ll call one of the people in the IT department.” Sam reached for his own phone. “See if he can trace Milton.”

“I doubt that you’ll be able to find him. Dealers like Milton don’t survive this long unless they are very careful.”

“Thaddeus Webber was careful,” Sam pointed out. “Someone found him.”

22


Imprisoned in the shadows, he watched her walk down the hall to the door of the lab. He called out her name, but in dreams there is no sound. He tried to move, desperate to stop her before she opened the door and disappeared inside the room where death awaited.

He managed to take one step and then another, but the darkness bound him as securely as a prison cell. He knew he would not get to her in time.

At the end of the hall, she stopped and looked back at him, her hand on the doorknob.

He said her name one more time, but she did not respond.

Cassidy.

She opened the door and entered the lab. The killer was waiting for her.…

SAM CAME AWAKE AS HE ALWAYS DID AFTER THE DREAM, BREATHING hard and drenched in sweat. He wrenched the covers aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. He forced himself to take a few deep breaths.

After a while he got up, yanked off his damp T–shirt, pulled on a pair of pants and opened the bedroom door. For a moment, he stood in the shadowed hall and studied the door across the way. Abby was inside that room. She had not invited him to join her. He had not pushed. His intuition warned him that she not only needed sleep, she needed time to come to terms with whatever had happened between them last night.

One night of hot, psi-infused sex did not a relationship make, he thought. Well, it had for him, but he could tell that Abby was having trouble with the concept. It was probably hard to focus on your personal life when you were worried about people with guns trying to kidnap you. A woman had to set priorities. So did a man, and keeping Abby safe was his one and only priority now.

He started down the dimly lit hall toward the stairs but paused when he heard the click of dog nails on the other side of Abby’s bedroom door. Newton was awake and alert inside the room.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, keeping his voice to a whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

He went downstairs to the kitchen, turned on a light and took the whiskey out of the cupboard. He poured a medicinal shot and drank it, leaning against the granite counter. The heat of the liquor burned away the last fragments of the dream.

When the glass was empty, he thought about going back to bed, but that would be futile. He would not sleep again tonight. He never did after the dream. He would be awake until morning, so he might as well do something productive.

He turned off the light, left the kitchen and went down to the basement. He walked along the hall, the same hall that appeared in the damn dream. The ghostly images of Cassidy walking this path to her doom were not from his memories. He had not been in the house that night. But he had imagined how it must have happened so many times that his reconstructed version of events had become as detailed and as graphic as a photograph.

He opened the door and went into the chamber. The energy in the room stirred all of his senses. The lab was drenched in darkness, but the specimens in the glass cases were all hot. They burned most strongly at night.

He jacked up his talent and walked through the dazzling rainbow of paranormal light. The hues ranged across the spectrum, from icy ultrablack to hot ultrareds and on into the silvery ultrawhite energy that the old alchemists had called the Hermetic Stream, the water that did not wet the hands.

The raw-amber pieces were especially powerful to his heightened senses. He stopped in front of a glass case and studied the copper-and-gold radiation given off by the specimen inside. The same color as Abby’s hair, he realized. He smiled a little and reached out to open the case.

Soft footsteps and the click of dog nails sounded in the hall. He turned away from the case and saw Abby and Newton silhouetted in the doorway. Abby had a flashlight in her hand. The beam speared into the lab, illuminating one of the glass cases.

Newton trotted into the room and immediately began to investigate the space, his nose to the floor.

Sam looked at Abby. She had put on her robe and slippers. Her hair was a wild storm of curls around her face. His slightly jacked senses got hotter.

“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.

She moved slowly into the room. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He went to the desk and flipped the switch on the lamp.

“Not much in the way of lighting,” she said. She switched off the flashlight. “I think of labs as being sterile, brightly lit places, like the Coppersmith Black Box.”

“They often turn off the lights in the Box. Paranormal energy is more vivid to the senses in darkness.”

“Yes.”

She walked slowly toward him, gazing into the cases that she passed. He felt energy shimmer in the atmosphere and knew that she had heightened her talent. He would know her aura anywhere and in any light, he thought.

“What do you see when you look at these stones?” she asked.

He looked at her, not the gems and crystals that surrounded them. She dazzled his senses more than any of the rare stones in the room.

“Fireworks, rainbows and a thousand shades of lightning,” he said.

“I can sense that they’re hot. Anyone with a scrap of talent could figure that out.” She stopped a short distance away. “But I don’t see fireworks, rainbows and lightning.”

“That’s because you’re not looking at what I’m looking at.”

“What are you looking at?”

“You.”

She took a step closer, and then another, until she was only a foot away. She raised her hand and brushed her fingertips across the phoenix tattoo that covered his shoulder.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked.

“A dream woke me.”

“A bad one,” she said. It was not a question.

“A recurring one.”

“Was it about the woman you were dating? The one who was killed here in this room?”

“Cassidy Lawrence. Good guess.”

“Not a guess,” Abby said. “Intuition. What really happened that night?”